Tear Me Open

You that come to birth and bring the mysteries, Your voice-thunder awakens us. Roar, lion of the heart,
And tear me open.
~ Rumi

This is the Material Plane. It could use a good sanding.

"Rumi says, Fall in love in such a way that it frees you from any connecting.

At poetry readings I say about Rumi’s poetry, “Folks, this is not country music.”
That’s very different from the lonely wail of: She left me, he left me; she came back; she left again.

Sufis say the way of love is a path of annihilation, of the beatitude of “as though it had never been.” Our original state is nonbeing, nonexistence, and we spend much of our lives trying to break free of matter, free of mind and desire, back into the deep region of being and nonbeing we are at the core. The refreshment of dreamless sleep when we are, but are not conscious, is a taste of it. We are here, then, but with no awareness of being here...

The love way is not religious. It is rather the origin and the longing inside religiousness. Footprints disappear at the ocean’s edge. When we bow to each other, feet become head in a circle. No one could tell with Rumi and Shams who was teacher and who the student. Lover, beloved, and love became one thing with them. Images of transparency and particles, light upon light, the candle at noon, occur, images of breath merging with sky. We are sleeping and wake inside another sleep; we wake again, and on ... as veils, the mist of language, the apparent limits, burn off. Each region of love leads to the unfolding. ..

This is the true religion. All others are thrown-away bandages beside it. This is the sema of slavery and mastery dancing together. This is not-being. I know these dancers.

Day and night I sing their songs in this phenomenal cage.

God has given us a dark wine so potent that, drinking it, we leave the two worlds. God has put into the form of hashish a power to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.

God has made sleep so that it erases every thought.

God made Majnun love Layla so much that just her dog would cause confusion in him.

There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds.
Don’t think all ecstasies are the same !

Jesus was lost in his love for God. His donkey was drunk on barley.

Drink from the presence of saints, not from those other jars.
Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight.

Be a connoisseur, and taste with caution.
Any wine will get you high.

Judge like a king, and choose the purest, the ones unadulterated with fear,
or some urgency about “what’s needed.”

Drink the wine that moves you as a camel moves when it’s been untied,
and is just ambling about.

Hypocrites give attention to form, the right and wrong ways of professing belief.
Grow instead in universal light.

When that revealed itself, God gave it a thousand different names, the least
of those sweet-breathing names being, the one who is not in need of anyone.

You’ve so distracted me. your absence fans my love.
Don’t ask how. Then you come near.

“Do not ...” I say, and “Do not . . . ,” you answer.
Don’t ask why this delights me.

In vour light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.

Drumsound rises on the air. its throb, my heart.

A voice inside the beat says,
“I know you’re tired, but come, this is the way.”

Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse to give this love to anyone?

Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim the huge fluid freedom

Lovers think they’re looking for each other, but there’s only one search: wandering this world is wandering that, both inside one transparent sky. In here there is no dogma and no heresy.

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did about the future. Forget the future. I’d worship someone who could do that.

On the way you may want to look back, or not.
But if you can say, There’s nothing ahead, there will be nothing there.

Stretch your arms and take hold the cloth of your clothes
with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain.

Good and bad are mixed.
If you don’t have both, you don’t belong with us.

When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.
There’s no place like that anywhere in the world."

~ Coleman Barks, Rumi: The Book of Love